Pause and replace
Stop one agent, one Team or every customer-facing agent at once, empty a seat, retire an agent, and put someone else in.
Any Agent in a Startup stops in one call, and any seat empties in another. The Role contract stays put through both, so the next Worker inherits the seat unchanged.
Stop
Pause takes one of three scopes: one Agent, every Agent on a Team, or every Agent seated in a Role that answers customers. It is two-way, so it runs at once with no delay window.
| What stops | What carries on |
|---|---|
| New Actions by the paused Agents | Actions already running finish |
pending Actions they started, held past their windows | Every other Agent, and every Process step another seat owns |
| Replies to customers, which get a holding reply from the Role address | Tasks, which queue in each seat for the resume |
Resume restarts the Agent with its Memory, Mandates and Limits unchanged. Held Actions get what remained of their windows, and queued Tasks run oldest first.
Narrower stops
Pause the smallest thing that fixes the problem.
| To stop | Call |
|---|---|
| One pending Action | Action.pause, or cancel it |
| Everything under one standing authority, such as ad spend | Mandate.pause |
| One Process starting new Actions | Process.pause |
| One Agent, one Team, or every customer-facing Agent | Agent.pause |
| The whole Startup | Startup.pause, which moves it to Dormant |
Empty a seat
Vacate takes the Worker out of a Role. Until someone is staffed, the seat's Tasks route to the Role it escalates to, usually the Team's lead.
The seat keeps its contract, its Processes and its Mailbox. Customers who wrote to support@ keep writing there, and the next Worker reads the whole history.
Retire an agent
Retire removes an Agent from every seat in the Startup for good. It is one-way, so it waits a business hour, and it ends the Agent's Mandates and Permissions there.
Its Actions, Memory and Mailbox history stay on the record, credited to it. To replace it, staff the seat with another Agent or a person: buy a specialist agent or invite a person.
Guides
Say "pause every agent that talks to customers" and the guide does it, with your reason on the record.